I have been doing a lot of cleaning these last 2 months, throwing away things from my childhood, etc... it hit me how much I hate the person I have become these last few years. I was so sheltered, so responsible, so organized (to the point of being anal) and just so much better than the person I am now. I want to start all over but before I can do that, there's a lot of debt I have to clear. I can't believe all the shit I used to do for Dante, all the lies I believed, all the suffering I did just to make him happy.

All these what ifs enter my mind... what if I had gotten a job at a Big 5 Accounting firm (it's now the Big 4 but I'm used to saying the Big 5), what if I hadn't had to interview with that ass Charlie Osaki, the head of recruiting for Deloitte at the time (who got fired a couple months later because of sexual harassment), I would probably have gotten the job there and I would have never met the guy who ruined my life. Maria had set me up with Deloitte and they invited me to all the recruiting events that fall and everyone seemed to like me except for Charlie. I was in a small group of people who they invited to all the events and I think everyone else in that group did get an offer from Deloitte. Someone told me that they went to one of those recruiting events with Charlie and he would point out - "look at that girl's ass", etc. and that's probably part of the reason he was fired. The day of my interview, I know Charlie deliberately chose me to interview - I don't know what grudge he had against me. I always tell people, I guess my ass wasn't big enough for Charlie. (My ass wasn't as big as it is now :)).

I don't know if I would have been happy at one of those Big 5 firms because I know a lot of people who went on to work for them and left as soon as their 2 years were up (you need 2 years experience to get your CPA license and the Big 5 was the best way to get it), but it was the way I had planned my life so it was such a disappointment for me that I wasn't able to get in. I was supposed to work for a Big 5, work my ass off for a couple years and enjoy the benefits of the hard work later... I was supposed to meet someone who was in the same field, who wore suits to work and who just commanded attention because they were just that amazing. Oh yeah, and he's cute (of course), fit and a little taller than me. I was supposed to be married in my late 20s and we were going to have 3 kids (girl, boy, girl), the house with the nice yard, and both of us were going to be making good money so we wouldn't have any money issues in our life... Life certainly doesn't turn out the way you plan it.

Even with all I went through working for Stan, I'm glad business management just fell into my lap like that. I was working for a criminal defense attorney after college (a lady I worked for part-time when I was in college) and I told her I wanted to go into accounting instead so I told her she needed to find someone... when she found a person to take over my job, I knew I had to get off my ass and look for my accounting job... it took me 5 days from the time I first sent out resumes to the day I signed my papers to work for Stan. I know now that if I have to do accounting for the rest of my life, I'd rather do what I do now - business management for entertainment clients. The entertainment industry part makes the job more fun - these people make lucrative amounts of money for what they do and some spend equally lucrative amounts of money on unimaginable stuff. We always have a lot of stories to tell in the office.

Wow, I really went off the subject... :)

I was going through my stuff at my parent's house and I see all the folders I had made for everything in my life. First off, the no-brainer, I had all my bank / credit card statements / bills 2 hole punched and in manila folders. I had folders for Target, Best Buy, and whatever stores I go to a lot and the folders were filled with receipts. Then I had folders for newspaper articles, mall pamphlets, fast food menus, directions to random places, application papers, etc. I also had random little notes in a folder. I found a folder labeled "Hawaii 2000" and I found the plane tickets, the little brochures we collected there, pictures, receipts, etc. I remember I did all this for the criminal defense attorney so I wanted to organize my life that way too.

I'm so glad she was my first real job - she taught me a lot of things that I wish I hadn't lost when I worked for Stan (he was so disorganized it was unbearable to work for him). My grammar was also so much better when I worked for her. I got disorganized in the 2.5 yrs I was with Stan because it was impossible to be organized around him and after a while, you just don't care. My grammar plummeted because I had to deal with assistants who barely knew English and after a while, you just dealt with it and you don't bother correcting the grammar on the letters the assistant sent out because no one else seemed to care.

Argh, I'm sleeping on an air mattress this week because I moved my bed to the new apartment last week... you ask why I haven't fully moved into the new apartment yet? The cable/internet isn't going to be set up until Saturday :). Some people understand me!! No cable, no internet = nothing to do. Plus, I'm here at the old apartment still packing my stuff. I'm so bad at this - I procrastinate because the deadline for me to move out is 10 more days. I'm going to try to do the bulk of the moving this weekend though.